Anne is an artist but most importantly she’s my muse. Perhaps I’ve stepped into sensitive territory. Let me explain.
The muse is the very engine of the artist, the human embodiment of the work. This is not sexist. Any gender can be a muse.
Anne is my muse but she’s also an artist. She is brilliant when she paints or draws. But she is distracted. I am too much to handle sometimes. She spends much of her energy nurturing me.
Perhaps it isn’t fair that I don’t encourage her more. I am certainly a psychic vampire. I am an obsessed writer. I suck all of Anne’s creative energy. I feed off it. I am devoted to art and art in life. Listen to me. This is important.
Perhaps.
I am a maniac but Anne is a part of my work. She is a spiritual collaborator in my work. This is Anne’s book as much as it is mine.
Being a writer is a frightening and lonely way to live. But the rewards are immense. Most people aren’t built for this kind of abuse. Staring all day into the abyss. Perhaps Anne is strong enough to be an artist. But she has me to contend with. My whirligig of madness flows in every direction.
Anne has kept me from committing suicide, from jumping out of a moving car, from getting into a fistfight.
Once, I called her at four in the morning, an hour before she had to get up for work. I had been drinking heavily, close to a blackout.
“Hello?” she was barely awake.
“Listen,” I said. “I just wanted to tell you something, all right?”
“OK.”
“I’m going to get into my car and drive down to Alabama.”
“No,” Anne said. “You can’t do that. I’d miss you.”
“Oh. Yeah, well, I’m not leaving for good. I just want to go steal a goat.”
“No baby,” Anne said. “I don’t think you should do that. You should probably sleep.”
I thought about it for a while. “Yeah, I am kinda tired.”
“That’s right baby, you just get some sleep.”
“OK,” I said. “But listen, I have something I need to ask you.”
“OK.”
“Will you marry me?”
She laughed. “Yeah, I’ll marry you. Get some sleep now, all right?”
“OK.”
I first realized that Anne was my muse when we took a short beach trip. We had been dating for three months or so and decided to spend the night in Ocean City, Maryland. We stayed in a little hotel near the boardwalk called the Plim Plaza. I started to call it the “Pimp Plaza.”
The room was small and plain. The TV was only a foot or so away from the bed, leaving just enough room to squeeze through on your way to the balcony, which was only a couple of feet away.
But we were two kids in our twenties with nothing on our minds but drinking and fucking and listening to each other talk. The hotel was a place to crash.
We dropped off our clothes and bathroom supplies and then walked around the boardwalk for a while. There were street musicians playing guitar and huckster magicians trying to woo an audience. There was a scrawny man in cutoff jeans and a tanktop who told passersby that, for only a dollar, they could look at the “strangest thing they’ve ever seen,” which was in a little black box on top of a podium in front of him. I was about to give him a dollar but Anne let me in on the trick. There was a mirror inside. All you saw was yourself looking at yourself. Strange, indeed, to be surprised at seeing your own reflection. I wished that Anne hadn’t told me. I would have liked to have found out the trick for myself.
After walking around for a while, going on a few carnival rides, holding hands and talking, we decided to find a bar. There were only a couple actual bars on the boardwalk. Most of the hotels had bars but we decided that if we were going to drink in a hotel bar, it should be ours, since we could drink as much as we wanted and then crash at our hotel room, not far away. (I have this fear about public intoxication. I had a friend who was tricked by a cop into walking away from his apartment while he was drunk so that the cop could arrest him. I don’t trust cops.) The bar we ended up at was big, a club for rednecks and yuppies. It was poorly lit and everything had a neon glow about it. There were a couple of disco balls hanging from the ceiling. It wasn’t the kind of place that I usually dug but you could feel the salty sea breeze through the open front doors and see the ocean from the bar. We sat on two uncomfortable bar stools and the bartender asked us what we wanted to drink.
“She’ll have a Jack and Coke,” I said. “And I’d like—uh—some sort of beach drink.”
“Beach drink?” the bartender said.
“Yeah, I mean we’re at the beach. I’m in the mood for something tropical. I don’t know. How about a Sangria or something?”
“Don’t know how to make that.”
“No? Well shit. I guess I’ll just have a Bloody Mary then.”
Fuck. But what was the point of arguing? I only had one night on the beach and I was with my beautiful fat Polish girl, Anne Wysokis, relaxing and listening to the waves outside. I was enjoying myself despite the tacky ambiance of the bar.
“This is great,” I said. “I’m having a great time. Thanks for doing this with me.”
“This was a good idea,” Anne said.
“I’m glad I know you,” I said.
“I’m glad I know you too.”
We drank for a few hours. I was happy and boozy. But it started to get dark outside and the wind was blowing hard. It looked like it was going to rain soon. So we left the bar and went back to our hotel room.
Drunk and happy, I opened the door and flopped onto the bed. Anne closed the door behind her and lay down beside me. It was raining hard outside. Anne kissed me and I kissed her, biting her lower lip.
It rained hard and thundered as we took our clothes off. I kissed her breasts, drunk and fumbling and laughing. We naked fucks, fucking wildly underneath the sheets. We lonely fucks, come together for a while. Exhausted with sweat and more sweat. We strange lonely creatures come together.
And then there was a silence between us.
We relaxed. My arm was around her shoulder. I kissed her on her forehead. The rain had stopped. I rolled over and stood up.
“Where you going?” Anne said.
“Gonna go smoke,” I said.
I walked out onto the balcony. I sat in a plastic chair and lit up a cigarette. I inhaled the calm. The boardwalk was empty except for a group of three teenage girls. As they walked by, I stood up and waved at them.
“Hullo!” I said.
“Hello—Oh my God!”
I wondered what her problem was. Then I realized that I was still completely naked. I flicked my cigarette over the balcony as I went inside.
Anne was laughing. “You crazy asshole,” she said. She couldn’t stop giggling. I jumped on the bed and began to tickle her.
Change
By my first night in Philadelphia I was already aware of the ghosts. They wanted to tell me their stories. But they needed a vessel. I wanted to hear their stories because I wanted to become a ghost myself.
The Mad Poet had been living in Philadelphia since the late seventies. I first met him in the summer of 2003, in Chicago, at a literary happening sponsored by the Radical Writers Association, of which I had just become a member. The RWA had, since late 2000, been holding protests, creating communal zines and agitating for the cause of underground writers. The leader of the group, Charles Jachowski, had been living in Philadelphia for about two years when he met the Mad Poet. They instantly took a liking to each other and the Mad Poet joined the RWA almost immediately. Myself, I read about the group in early 2001, while I was browsing through the literary section of The Village Voice in my college library. Before I had read the article, which chronicled the first few months of the group’s protests and press conferences, I had been a fairly typical English major. But after I read about the group of street writers, living and creating art with dirt underneath
their fingernails. I decided that that was exactly the type of writer I wanted to be. I wanted to be a visionary. I wanted to agitate and shock. I didn’t want to get an MFA or become a college professor or get published in respectable journals. An hour before reading the article I wanted all of those things. But now I had seen another possible life, Mad Life, and I wanted it.
Birmingham, Alabama is a long way away from Philadelphia, so I didn’t contact Charles immediately. Over the next year and a half or so, I published a couple of short stories in a few lo-fi print and web zines and I started my own zine. In late 2002, I finally wrote to Charles.
I was accepted into the group around March 2003. But I lived in Alabama and had yet to meet Charles or anyone else in the RWA.
That would change by mid-summer of the same year. A zinester had been hit by a car while riding his bicycle to work. He was going to live, but he was in bad condition. Charles rushed to set up a benefit reading for the guy, more for moral support than anything else. Some money would be raised but not nearly enough to make a dent in the uninsured writer’s medical expenses, which totaled over a million dollars.
The benefit reading was to be held in Chicago in June. I was going to be there to watch the reading, to support the hurt writer and to possibly show Kaye, my new wife, a good time with some of my fellow madness-makers.
Kaye and I met the Mad Poet at breakfast in a Chicago diner the morning of the show. He smiled wide when Charles introduced us, despite missing many teeth. The rest of his teeth were nearly rotten, barely hanging on to his gums.
The Mad Poet was polite, even shy. I had no idea the kind of personality that was underneath. It turned out that he was always a bit shy around new people, though never too shy to be completely honest and blunt when he spoke to you.
I was also shy around new people. So I didn’t talk to the Mad Poet much that morning. I’m not sure if I even talked to him at all.
After breakfast, Kaye and I went back to our hotel room to take a nap.
We arrived at the Barrelhouse Tavern around seven, an hour before the show was to start. The Mad Poet was onstage, practicing the poetry he was going to read that night. He waved when he saw us walk in. Kaye, the official photographer for the event, snapped a few photos of him. Then I went to the bar and ordered a whiskey and Coke.
The reading was fairly uneven. There were decent, mediocre and one or two excellent performances. For me, though, the highlight was the Mad Poet, reading his poem, “Regan’s Brain” in a black executioner’s mask and aviator sunglasses. The bar was dimly lit. I imagine he must have been half blind in that getup. The poem, surreal as it was, had a sort of plot to it, concerning the dead President’s brain and its madcap post-body adventures. I was quite drunk by that time, and laughed loudly, perhaps even inappropriately. I once even fell out of my chair and began slapping my knees, unable to control the intense nutjob happiness in my belly.
After the show was over, Kaye and I met the Mad Poet at the buffet table, as he piled his plate with free goodies.
“Man, I really liked your poetry. It was hilarious.”
“Hey, man, thanks,” the Mad Poet said. “Where youse guys live?”
“Birmingham,” I said.
“Shit. And you drove all this way for the show?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I really wanted to meet some RWA people.”
“Hey, man, if you’re ever in Philadelphia, look me up, OK? You ever been to Philadelphia?”
“No,” I said.
“You should come up sometime. You’d like it. Philly’s a haunted city, you know?”
I next saw the Mad Poet early in 2004, at an RWA meeting in Philadelphia. I stayed in a Holiday Inn in the Center City area, close to the bar where the meeting was to be held. We all got insanely drunk and plotted the future of the organization. At one point, Charles asked the Mad Poet to sell the city to those of us who came from out of town (Charles dreamed of Philadelphia as the center of the new literary movement).
The Mad Poet stood up and spoke, flailing his arms in the air. “Philadelphia is full of ghosts of writers past. It’s the penultimate writer’s city. It’s got, uh, great parks with plenty of trees and great readings. It’s a city of pirates. Hell, I’m a pirate. If anyone wants to move here, I can get them a pirate job.”
What he meant was that he did light construction and home repairs and got paid in cash. He didn’t report any of the money to the government.
“I refuse to pay taxes in a time of war,” the Mad Poet once said. “And there’s always a war on.”
So it goes, I suppose.
I saw the Mad Poet for a third time in the summer of 2005. Charles had scheduled a big reading at a bar called the Medusa Lounge. And so I went.
This time I stayed at the Mad Poet’s townhouse in West Philadelphia. As far as I could tell, the Mad Poet was the only white person on the block. The street smelled of Chinese food and sewage. There was an abandoned, boarded-up ice cream shop on the corner. It was a total slum. It was my kind of place.
Early afternoon before the show, we met with a few RWA out of towners and locals at a fairly upscale restaurant. It wasn’t the kind of place you would expect a bunch of greasy, street-hardened writers to feel comfortable in. And we didn’t, really. But several members of the local press had promised Charles that they would show up and interview us. I wore jeans and a t-shirt but others attempted to dress nicely. The Mad Poet even wore a bright red vest. It had a Party City logo on it. I don’t think that he had ever worked at Party City.
As it turned out, it was all for nothing, since none of the promised press showed up. All we had left at the end of the two hours we spent there was a bit of a buzz and an expensive bar tab.
And it only got worse. When the Mad Poet and I went outside, we found an empty space next to the sidewalk where his car should have been. I looked at the empty space and then up and noticed the sign that neither of us had seen when we pulled up: “No Parking.” Shit. His goddamn car had been towed.
“What the fuck?” the Mad Poet said. “This fucking city. They put the sign where you can’t even see it. Those fuckers. How is someone supposed to find a parking spot in this goddamn city?” The sign was in plain view. We had just failed to see it when we went in. But I didn’t say anything. Suddenly, the Mad Poet raised his arms toward the sky and said, “Fuck you, Philadelphia!” Even in this jaded city, where freaky behavior is more the norm than the exception, several people turned and looked at him as they passed on the sidewalk.
It wasn’t until the following year, when I was living with him, that I was able to fully contextualize the event.
There had been some construction going on behind his townhouse. They were building a new apartment complex or something. The workers would start their machines at six or seven in the morning, waking both of us up. The Mad Poet hated the construction with a passion, especially considering that the space used to be a sort of unofficial park. One morning, as we were eating omelets, the Mad Poet, in a rage over the construction, shouted, “They killed my favorite fucking tree, man. I used to sit underneath it in the shade and read. We were friends, man. Then one day it was just a fucking stump. They killed my tree, man. I walked up to one of them guys and said, ‘You killed my friend. You motherfuckers killed my friend.’ Now the only place in the city you can see trees is on the murals they’ve painted on the buildings.”
It was only in this context that the outburst outside the restaurant nearly a year before made sense. The Mad Poet saw ghosts and souls everywhere. Cities had souls. Trees had souls. Everything had a soul and everything was alive. He was convinced that he was an old soul. He meditated every day and once had a vision in his intense concentration that he had begun his cycle of lives as a demon.
“I ain’t no fucking aristocrat and never have been. In feudal England, they executed me for stealing a landlord’s sheep.”
The ve
ssel, man. The Mad Poet was an old ghost and he was a vessel for ghosts. He was open to something that I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand because I never believed. Not literally at least. But I was able to accept that he felt things I couldn’t imagine. The wealth of his emotional bank was nearly limitless.
My first night living in Philadelphia, after unpacking my stuff into my new bedroom, the Mad Poet took me out to a clean, well-lit Irish pub. It wasn’t the kind of place I generally liked, and I was pretty sure that the Mad Poet didn’t like it either. But we were there, sitting at the bar and sipping beers when the Mad Poet began telling me about Kathy Change.
Kathy Change! What an impossible story! What a fucking narrative! She was something else, man. Someone entirely different.
In 1996, before I was even sixteen, Kathy Change set herself on fire. Did you hear that? On fucking fire, man. She did it for art, for Transformation. She set herself on fire near the Peace Statue on the Penn campus. A nearby police officer tried to save her but she died.
Kathy Change believed in Transformation. She believed in an organic human evolution. Such a crisis creature is man that only a great spectacle can get his attention. She was going to ignite, ignite, ignite and then the world would be at peace.
Yes, the great Transformation would happen after she killed herself. The snake would stop eating its tail. There would be singing in the street. And there would be dancing. Above all, dancing! Celebrations for days afterward, weeks perhaps.
The governments of the world would dissolve because there would be no need for them. The people of the world would cooperate. There would be happiness everywhere. There would be no wars, no starvation and no more money to become greedy over. Humanity would finally become human.
Such naiveté to marvel at.
But she had faith. She believed in people. I want to believe in people. I want to be wrapped in a blanket of faith. So few people have such intense faith. I don’t. How unimaginable is the pain she suffered? I try to imagine it and I can’t even come close.
Candles burn. Buildings burn. Love burns. And Kathy Change is still on fire, in the hearts of a few West Philadelphia artists. Too few people understood what she was trying to do.
But the Mad Poet did. Her ghost was using him as a vessel as he told me her story. It was as if Kathy Change was actually speaking to me. She speaks through ghost believers and dream followers.
To some, it must have seemed as if she had always been a ghost. But she was a real flesh creature for a while. She was an enigma. There were always rumors about her.
Some of the stories were true, though they were sometimes hard to believe. Change spent a decade and a half roaming around Philadelphia, performing her dances and her anti-war chants. She was often on the Penn campus or at the bottom of the steps of the art museum, chanting and improvising poetry, all while dancing and waving colorful banners. She sang songs of love, of peace and of human evolution. Onlookers rarely took her seriously. Instead, they were attracted to the spectacle of the thing. Her frustration with them was understandable.
Though the Mad Poet had never met her while she was alive, he was aware of her, had heard the stories about her. He was especially aware of the way she died.
The Mad Poet was after the spirit and Kathy Change had the spirit. It was the synthesis of life and art. Kathy Change was synthesis.
Later I will go to work at the grocery store and I’ll have to see all the icy people. The robotics of it all. So for now, I turn on Bob Dylan’s song, “I Want You,” and my spirit is temporarily revived.
But, those icy people! A frightening loneliness flows through my bones. I think of Anne, working in an office somewhere. I want to hold her right now. I can only love people like Anne. I can’t bring myself to love the icy people. I resist it.
This is why I’ll never be like Kathy Change, who had love and hope for all humans, icy or not. She felt a powerful universal love and an art-life synthesis. And she lives on as a ghost, inside people like the Mad Poet.
There will always be a distance between my art and my life.
But I will push onward, toward Change’s light.
It’s the best I can do.
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